


Legends

by togina



Category: Justified
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 14:21:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12706749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: Tim thought he was watching for Givens to meet the man behind the legend, to see how being a marshal was done. Then Raylan Givens loped through the glass doors one afternoon, ten days early, all angles and endless lines, cowboy hat resting easy on his head. (“You want a handkerchief to mop up that drool?” Rachel asked, like she wasn’t staring herself. Rachel always was quicker on the draw.)





	Legends

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cherlocked (cher69)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cher69/gifts).



> So cherlocked was incredibly kind about this, because what she'd requested was Raylan/Tim and I attempted that and instead I wrote a story about Raylan and a story about Tim and they sort of occasionally intersect but really it's only vaguely more Raylan/Tim than canon. Speaking of canon, I more or less try to follow canon events but address them kind of at random and may have some things wrong (feel free to correct me!).
> 
> Tim also references _Gunsmoke_ and _Tombstone_ fairly frequently, so it might not hurt to wikipedia them so you're aware of why he keeps calling Winona "Miss Kitty".

Tim started watching Raylan Givens before he’d even made it to Kentucky. He read Givens’s file front to back, seventeen years with the U.S. Marshals to Tim’s one and the paperwork to show for it, a man who found his niche hunting fugitives to the border and bringing them back in handcuffs or body bags.

“Well, shit,” Art had said, after an hour-long phone call where he’d shut his glass door and tried to muffle his shouting of _What?_ and _Is he all right?_ and _What the fuck do you mean, twenty-four hours, what is this, Tombstone?_ “Guess we’re getting a new deputy marshal.” He raised his eyebrows, rubbed a hand over his bald head, and smirked at Tim and Rachel’s shock. “Raylan Givens will be joining us in a few weeks. Just as soon as the investigation’s over,” he muttered, ignored their flurry of questions and wandered back into his office to yell at a few more people on the phone.

Tim had heard of Raylan Givens, of course. Everyone that went through Glynco did, even after Givens had left off teaching firearms and gotten back to chasing fugitives in Miami. Raylan Givens knew what it was to watch someone die—not through a scope, not stretched out prone and hundreds of yards away like Tim had learned, but close enough to see the barrel of the other man’s gun, close enough to reach across the table and check the pulse in his cooling hand.

Or, at least, that’s the story Tim told himself, peering down the sight for Raylan Givens weeks before he was meant to come through the doors.

Tim thought he was watching for Givens to meet the man behind the legend, to see how being a marshal was done. Then Raylan Givens loped through the glass doors one afternoon, ten days early, all angles and endless lines, cowboy hat resting easy on his head. (“You want a handkerchief to mop up that drool?” Rachel asked, like she wasn’t staring herself. Rachel always was quicker on the draw. Tim spent too long setting up his shot, so focused on the story unfolding in his scope that he missed the forest _and_ the trees.)

It wasn’t til a man strolled into the office on Raylan’s third day, dark hair wild with a forehead that overshadowed his eyes—nothing special about him, brown flannel shirt and shitkicker boots, one more Kentucky hillbilly in a never ending line, but this particular hillbilly brought Raylan Givens to his feet, set every pretty line and angle of him sideways like a guitar string tightened half a turn and vibrating in a new key.

“Boyd Crowder,” Raylan said, and it wasn’t a condemnation. “You came.”

“Raylan,” the hillbilly Boyd Crowder replied, weighted down each syllable of Raylan’s name and Raylan didn’t quite smile and –

_Oh_ , Tim thought. He let himself watch Raylan approach Crowder because the whole office was staring, Art and Rachel and Jim who was just there to deliver the mail. They didn’t shake hands. They didn’t do much of anything at all, but Tim kept his eyes on Raylan’s hands and Raylan’s shoulders and the way Raylan’s weight shifted toward Boyd Crowder, and realized three days after Rachel that he’d been watching for _that_ , too.

 

Raylan Givens carried himself like a man who knew he was the prototype for a legend, his boot heels clicking on the marble floors, loud and intentional, making you listen for the absent jingle of spurs—his shoulders rolled back so his jacket didn’t quite hide the gun, leather holster on his hip because Raylan Givens wasn’t anyone’s regulated, shoulder-holster wearing federal agent. Raylan Givens was a _lawman._ His hat was white, of course, worn in but spotless, tilted up so the man could survey his domain.

Tim had never really gotten out of the habit of telling himself stories. Raylan Givens was an easy target, in that sense: man hightails it out of Fucking Nowhere, Appalachia, plays the trigger on a gun like Mozart reborn and knows it, shoots to kill and builds his reputation on gunpowder and smoke. In Glynco they’d whisper about Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens like kids telling ghost stories after dark, guessing how many fugitives he’d shot and swearing they had a friend who knew a guy who’d once seen Givens make a recruit stand in front of the target and try not to shit his jeans while Givens shot out his entire silhouette.

Tim figured Raylan grew up watching too much _Gunsmoke_ and fancied himself Matt Dillon, that Raylan had learned how to loom larger than life from John Wayne and the silver screen. (Sometimes the stories Tim told weren’t all that different from the ones he’d lived. There was a reason he’d joined the Army at seventeen.)

Raylan worried about Ava Crowder, and Tim could have told you that Raylan Givens liked his bourbon straight and his women blonde and busty and beautiful, that he rode into town on a white horse and always stole a little more than a kiss before he rode away. Raylan shot Boyd Crowder in the chest, and Tim could have told you that Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens always got his man.

Raylan said “Boyd Crowder,” and the Raylan Givens Tim had so thoughtfully assembled clattered like an empty shell casing to the floor.

 

Raylan Givens trailed gunpowder in his wake, and five days after he strolled into Kentucky Tim found himself staring down the long, familiar line of a rifle barrel and watching his bullet slam into a man’s chest. Before Raylan came to town, Tim had gone two years without killing a man.

The bullet went right where Tim put it. He knew it would; the Army had made certain that—unlike Raylan Givens—Tim Gutterson never missed. His hands didn’t start shaking until he went into the house to help, his whole body vibrating with something that wasn’t remorse.

Vibrating with something that made him act exactly like the dumb seventeen-year-old kid who had walked in on Eddie Walker jerking off in the showers after practice and offered to help him out.

“All right,” Raylan said, barely through the bathroom door, shrugged one shoulder and started undoing his belt. Eddie Walker had called Tim a faggot and threatened to tell the team. Raylan leaned back against the bathroom wall like a woman in a painting, hat tilted back and eyes on Tim as he unzipped his jeans and took his cock in hand.

Tim choked on the apology he’d planned. For one interminable, airless moment he just stood there, unable to believe that Raylan Givens—U.S. Deputy Marshal _Raylan Givens_ , the legend—was standing two feet away from him in a public bathroom in Lexington, Kentucky, dick out and waiting for Tim to make a move.

“You coming?” Raylan wondered, drawling the second word with a grin that made Tim think of Raylan’s mouth curling around Boyd Crowder’s name, knocked him out of his stupor and sent him onto his knees.

 

“I didn’t think you swung this way,” Tim said after, zipping up his pants, trying not to stare and unable to look away from the sight of Raylan Givens leaning loose-limbed against the wall with his jeans still unbuttoned, lazily tugging a few paper towels loose from the dispenser to wipe Tim’s come off his hands.

“Don’t be stupid,” Raylan responded, and Tim waited for Raylan to confess that his proclivities had always run towards men, despite the gorgeous ex-wife working two floors away, waited for an explanation that would – “’Course you did. You’re not dumb enough to try to suck off a straight man in a courthouse bathroom in Kentucky.”

Tim felt like he’d been standing in the path of an oncoming train, only to have it change tracks and pass him by. Raylan cocked his eyebrow, tucked his shirt into his jeans and put himself together with the ease of a man who’d been propositioned in every restroom from Florida to California, who’d fucked his way through a thousand courtrooms and never lost his hat.

“Next time,” Raylan added, belt buckled and hands clean and hat on and heading for the door, “why don’t you pick a bathroom on a different floor. Art’s liable to walk into this one—his prostate ain’t what it once was, and I’d hate to be the reason he starts wearing Depends.”

Then he tipped his hat at Tim and walked out the door. Tim blinked at the bathroom mirror, staring blankly at some guy with messy hair and swollen lips who’d just sucked off Raylan Givens in the courthouse on a Tuesday night. _Next time_ , Raylan had said, but Tim still wasn’t sure there had been a first time, or if he’d nodded off at the office and had a particularly vivid dream.

 

“Where you been?” Tim wondered, when Raylan turned up late for the third time in only ten days of work.

“Lexington Detention Center,” Raylan answered, shrugged his jacket off and didn’t elaborate, stood up and went into Art’s office when Tim opened his mouth to ask why.

Which was all right, because Tim hadn’t decided if he wanted to ask why Raylan would be at the Lexington Detention Center first thing in the morning or why Raylan was lying about where he’d been, because Tim had walked past a courtroom last week and seen Raylan Givens sitting in the last row.

Tim wondered what Raylan was doing in court. He couldn’t be on any cases—well, none that had made it into a courtroom in Kentucky, not only a few days and two shootings into his stay. Then the judge had said, “Did you catch that, Ms. Hawkins?” and Tim had followed Raylan’s sightlines to the woman perched delicately on a stool at the front of the room, a regular Miss Kitty in a pencil skirt and silk blouse, exactly the kind of woman that could keep a man coming back to the Long Branch Saloon and keep careful track of his tab.

Tim leaned against the wall in the hallway, for a little while, watching Raylan watch his ex-wife. Raylan had ended it, Tim thought. No man in a white cowboy hat hunting fugitives clear through to Nicaragua could stay tied down for long. Or maybe he hadn’t ended it, Tim reconsidered, because what man that had ended his marriage decided to spy on his ex-wife in a courtroom at nine am? Maybe Raylan had kissed her goodbye from his horse, dug his boots into the mare’s ribs and taken off for the horizon; maybe she’d gotten tired of shading her eyes, squinting into the sun and straining to glimpse a cloud of dust that might herald his return.

Tim might have stood there for fifteen minutes, for an hour, for the day—he could spin one story into another, shot lined up and nothing left but the waiting, Scheherazade with a sniper’s rifle—but Raylan had shifted his weight, ready to stand, and Tim took that as his cue to get gone.

 

Raylan and Rachel went off to California hunting a fugitive, and Tim didn’t eye the horizon or steal a kiss before they left. Raylan had plenty of women auditioning for that role, and Tim wasn’t his ex-wife or the high school sweetheart who’d shot her husband over mashed potatoes a few weeks before.

“Ava wasn’t my high school sweetheart.”

Raylan chuckled when Tim blurted out that particular story, because sex had an unfortunate tendency to loosen Tim’s tongue, and Raylan was fresh off the plane from the border and had suggested Tim pull his SUV off into an abandoned parking lot and take his time getting Raylan home.

“Bet she wanted to be,” Tim replied, because he’d met Ava Crowder shortly after she’d shot her husband, blonde and bruised and beautiful, a damsel in distress if he’d ever seen one and exactly U.S. Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens’s type of girl.

Raylan shrugged, and Tim shifted and reveled in the ache. He hadn’t anticipated that Raylan Givens would be so eager to have sex with a man, or so logistically well informed. Anyone could enjoy a warm mouth on their dick, Tim knew from nine long years in the Army, but Raylan had stripped Tim down and demonstrated with a thoroughness Tim appreciated that Kentucky hillbillies weren’t the only assholes he knew his way around.

“If not Ava, then who?” Tim wondered idly, curious despite the twinge in his gut that told him not to kick a sleeping dog. “You must have had some girl bawling her eyes out when you didn’t stay.” And, sure enough, Tim’s gut had had the right of it. Raylan ignored Tim’s inquiry in favor of sliding back into jeans tighter than a man of forty had a right to wear, an enigma in a white cowboy hat and a badge.

Tim wasn’t the best investigator. He had his strengths, he knew: he was fast and accurate with a gun, not as quick as Raylan, maybe, but his aim was twice as good; he could stay on a stakeout for days without tiring, could keep quiet and watch a whole room of people without missing a thing. Hyper vigilant, the VA shrink would have called it, but it was one of the few skills that Army had honed that Tim wasn’t too eager to leave behind.

Still, he couldn’t scan the room and sniff out a liar. Not like Rachel, who eyed even her mama with suspicion, or Art with his bloodhound’s nose and marshal’s stiffy. Not like Raylan, who regarded everyone that crossed his path as if they wanted to fuck him or shoot him—or maybe they’d met him planning to do the one and found themselves wanting both before the day was through.

Tim watched the room and thought that maybe the woman killed her husband because he beat her, or maybe they’d been running oxy and he’d shorted her on her cut, or maybe she’d gotten tired of his beer gut and his bellyaching and slept with someone else to pass the time, and he’d found out and gone for the gun only she’d always been quicker than he was, and smarter, too. Sometimes Tim stared and stared and forgot that his targets were only a few feet away, now, that he could ask them questions and demand that they reply.

Well, he could ask the questions, at least, though Raylan was buttoned back into his shirt and buckled into his jeans and clearly waiting on Tim to get dressed and drive and no closer to answering Tim’s innocuous question about young love than he’d been when he was naked and smirking five minutes before.

_Next time_ , Tim thought, only next time wound up being months later, because Raylan went chasing after Boyd Crowder and Ava Crowder and apparently chasing the former Mrs. Winona Givens back into his bed. Raylan liked his damsels in distress. Tim got that part right after all.

It didn’t help that Tim stumbled up four hours late to the VFW in Harlan, dog tags out and someone else’s flannel shirt on, heading towards drunk and wanting to shove that fact in Art’s face for calling him out of the bathroom of a bar just to use his veteran’s ID, maybe shoving the shirt and the rest of it at Raylan. Of course, Tim’s gambit was nothing compared to Raylan’s father coming to his feet and slapping his marshal son in the face for the whole VFW to see, though it was only Tim and a few of the young kids at the bar who had the decency to look surprised. And if Raylan avoided Tim for a while after that, well, Tim understood not wanting to stand near anyone that could look at you and see the imprint of your dad’s hand against your cheek. Tim hadn’t figured on _understanding_ Raylan Givens, and he thought the shock of that must show in his eyes.

It was about the same time that Tim met Boyd Crowder—truly met him, (though as the years passed Tim wondered if anyone had _truly_ met Boyd Crowder,) not a quick glimpse of a man with dark eyes awkwardly buttoned and tucked into a shirt a size too large, staring straight through the two-way glass; not laid out dying in the back of an ambulance with his blood drying on Raylan’s pale skin, another shot Raylan made across a table, close enough to reach out and take the man’s hand.

Boyd Crowder wore his villainous black hair spiked and long, Raylan held on to his white hat, and Tim wondered if everyone from Harlan was nothing but a legend, Harlan County herself a myth of a place that mortal men weren’t meant to find.

 

Raylan went back to Miss Kitty – to Winona, his ex-wife, and Tim didn’t mind. Raylan Givens wasn’t the kind of man you could keep, and Tim wasn’t really looking to keep a man any longer than he kept the bottle of tequila he’d had the bartender leave on the bar.

Tim had chosen the U.S. Marshals service because they gave you a gun and badge and didn’t leave you in the same place for too long, because they offered everything the Army had, only without sticking their nose in his privates or insisting that he kill someone to get paid.

“You can’t make that shot,” the knucklehead holding a gun on a pregnant woman sneered, and Raylan nodded in agreement but said that Tim could, and Tim felt something like pride warm his chest at Raylan’s surety in his aim.

Tim made the shot. They saved the girl, and Raylan tipped his hat and rode off back to his ex-wife, and Tim rode to the nearest saloon and ordered the cheapest bottle of tequila they had.

The bartender liked Tim’s mouth enough to take him out for drinks the next night, and Tim glanced across the courtyard—there was a man out with his mistress, maybe she worked at his wife’s hair salon, probably had a small, yappy dog; there were three buddies out for the night without their wives and kids, a concert in the suburbs more excitement than they’d had in years—and saw Raylan Givens hand his ex-wife a beer.

He sucked off his date in the bathroom and bought a six pack for the road.

But it was all right. Tim was all right. He came to work sober, didn’t flinch when someone slammed a car door, and thanked god that his family was all dead and buried in Arkansas when it turned out that Raylan wasn’t the only Deputy Marshal in Lexington with family on the wrong side of the law. He would have shot Clinton, if Rachel had given him the nod, and he wondered if that was because Tim had spent nine years waiting on the Army’s nod or because Raylan Givens had brought the Old West with him when he came to town.

Tim Gutterson was a regulated, regimented federal agent. But he was also a kid who’d come home from Basic armed and eager to put a bullet through his father’s head. Tim wasn’t a legend, though, and so instead of getting the showdown he’d dreamed of, he drove into town only to learn that his old man’s clogged, corroded heart had stolen his shot.

Tim wasn’t the best investigator, but he knew enough to be suspicious when old money needed counting and Raylan started slamming doors in his face and Art popped one more Tylenol than usual whenever Raylan Givens walked in. Twenty-nine years of living had taught Tim to mind his own business, though, so he stayed out of it and chased bank robbers on oxygen tanks until Art set him to minding Raylan.

“What’s going on?” Tim asked, though he didn’t really expect Raylan to answer, and they both kept away from the bed.

Raylan answered by leaving for the gas station bathroom with a wink, leaving Tim with a pint of ice cream and taking off for parts unknown.

Tim had maybe learned something about tracking down suspects from Rachel, or he’d just been watching Raylan Givens for too long, because he started by checking on Winona—wasn’t surprised not to find Raylan there, Raylan Givens would light out for the horizon before he’d set up house in the Long Branch Saloon—and then pulled onto I-75 going south without bothering to search for Raylan’s cell on GPS. Raylan Givens was a white hat and a quick draw and Harlan County was the Tombstone he couldn’t stay away from for long.

 

A few weeks later, Tim shot another man who was threatening Raylan, Art’s bullhorn more deafening than the gunshot, announcing Tim’s third man dead since Raylan Givens came to town. Raylan took sick leave on account of the hole in his side, and Tim found that the office was exactly like he’d remembered it in the nine months before Raylan Givens had come, only four times as dull. Tim had grown accustomed to working in a legend, and it was unbearably boring to return to arguments over coffee brands, prisoner retrieval that didn’t end in a gunfight, paperwork and the daily grind.

Then Raylan returned and Boyd Crowder with him—every hero needed a villain, Tim knew, and wondered who the sidekick in this story was, him or Rachel or Art. Both men were drawn in starker lines than Tim remembered, trimmed down to the bone with hair long enough that Tim suspected they’d read the story of Sampson one too many times.

They slammed through the glass a minute later, and Tim reached for his gun and Art bellowed and Raylan hit the floor and didn’t quite smile, and just like that the office fell back into the myth that rested on Raylan’s shoulders like Raylan’s hand rested easy on the butt of his gun.

Tim played his part, bent where maybe he should have stood firm, let Raylan drop to his knees and return an old favor after Miss Kitty grew tired of waiting for Raylan Givens and packed herself and their unborn baby out the door.

They came to something of an accord. Tim didn’t stay at Raylan’s shithole and Raylan didn’t stay the night or interfere with Tim’s ongoing affair with tequila and they kept it out of the office bathroom where Art might see.

They didn’t go out to eat, though sometimes Tim would stop off and order food so they’d have it handy, because Raylan cooked like a pretty bachelor—which was to say he tilted his head and smiled and sometimes found himself paying more for a free meal than he’d planned. Tim cooked the same way he had when he was five, which was to say he ate his eggs scrambled, his macaroni and cheese with hot dogs, and his chili out of a can. Take out was just a better idea all around.

And it wasn’t anything serious. Wasn’t much of anything at all, besides some sarcasm and good sex, because Raylan Givens was bound and determined to get out of Kentucky—back to Miami, which Tim couldn’t understand, what did a legend like Raylan Givens want with a city built on stories of eighties suits and muscle cars and mundane vice—and Tim wouldn’t have taken up with Raylan if he’d thought for a second that Raylan wanted to stay. He could admit that life was more interesting with Raylan Givens the mythmaker around the office, but Tim liked his tequila and the anonymity of his bar bathrooms and Raylan the man kept peering too closely at Tim’s face and the contents of his fridge.

“What are you doing with Raylan?” Rachel asked, late one night when he’d come to relieve her from taking calls.

“Nothing,” Tim answered honestly, because Tim wasn’t a mythical lawman and he wasn’t a dark-haired villain; he wasn’t a damsel in distress or a saloon owner or even a satisfactory sidekick. Tim wasn’t in any of the stories he told (except the endings, when he pulled the trigger and wrote the last words); where could he possibly fit into Raylan’s?

“Mmm-hmm,” Rachel hummed, folding her arms and staring implacably at Tim. He’d heard that hum before; it was one of the many things that promised Rachel would make for a downright terrifying mother, someday. (A little over a year down the road it would make her a downright terrifying interim Chief.)

But Tim was telling the truth. Raylan didn’t run to Tim when Arlo tried to kill his only son, again, and Tim didn’t go to Raylan when Mark found himself mixed up with oxy dealers and in desperate need of friends.

“Raylan’s not some fairytale prince,” Rachel warned, before she heeded Tim’s silence and let it lie. “Or Wyatt Earp, or whoever you’ve made him out to be. That man’s a lit fuse with a hair-trigger temper, and there ain’t nothing romantic about being so angry that folks wind up dead.”

Folks had wound up dead around Tim for the past decade or so. He’d expected Mark to be one of them years ago, one of a dozen kids he met in the sandbox who wasn’t cut out for war, scared and shaking every time you slung a gun on them and put them on patrol. They met on Mark’s first deployment and Tim’s third, jacked them both off after dark because the kid needed a distraction and this was the best comfort Tim knew how to provide. Then Mark had found opium made for a better distraction, and Tim should’ve been grateful that the habit took five years to kill him instead of one.

Only Tim wasn’t grateful, and this time it was him slipping off in the middle of the day and coming in late and Raylan and Rachel and Art watching him with investigating eyes. Tim fucked harder at night, too, wanted to blame Raylan for stirring up so much shit in Harlan that the sewers overflowed all the way to Lexington and got Mark killed, even knowing that the facts of the case stated that one ex-Army junkie had simply run into another at a bad time.

Tim wanted to shoot Boyd Crowder’s ride and he wanted to shoot Boyd Crowder for drawing hillbilly trash to Kentucky like moths to a flame, and he wanted to shoot Raylan Givens for all of it. Every hero needed a villain, and Raylan had ridden into town with a white hat and Boyd Crowder had risen to the occasion like a man who’d been waiting years to fill the role.

In the end, Tim only got to shoot Colton Rhodes, and Rachel was right, there was nothing romantic about being so angry that people wound up dead, though that didn’t make it any less satisfying to put a bullet through the man’s chest. Tim wasn’t a hero and Colton Rhodes wasn’t a villain and, unlike Raylan Givens, Tim Gutterson never missed his mark.

Tim drank a little more, after, to cope with the way his boss and his colleagues and the cowboy in his bed kept eyeing him like _Tim_ was the powder keg in the office waiting to explode. Then, eventually, after the umpteenth bottle and the resulting hazy night, he thought of Mark, nineteen and wide-eyed with terror, a straight boy begging to be fucked just so someone would hold him together for a while, pupils blown and begging for more. Tim drank a little less after that. Maybe Rachel was right, and Raylan Givens’s legend wasn’t something to be emulated by mortal men.

 

“Raylan seems to enjoy your company,” Boyd Crowder said lightly, once they were into their third game of Scrabble, dropping ‘versa’ in front of the ironic ‘tile’ Tim had just played and reaping the triple word score. Tim marked the points down, because Boyd had conceded with a pleased grin when Tim hadn’t trusted him to keep score.

Tim squinted at the board and at Boyd Crowder across the table from him, because both were suspect. Tim had the distinct feeling that Boyd Crowder had never spoken of something lightly in his life.

“I suppose enough day trips to Harlan will do that,” Tim replied, swearing at his tiles and putting down ‘ploy’ on the ‘l’. He made sure not to flinch or tense his shoulders or look away from the board, because Boyd Crowder had to be legendary, and legendary villains weren’t so easy to fool. “Can’t say much for the man’s taste in music, though.”

Boyd chuckled, leaned back and surveyed Tim and looked delighted with what he found, then leaned forward and played ‘vengeful’ on the ‘v’, set each tile down with a deliberateness that rivaled the click of Raylan’s boot heels on a marble floor and waited patiently for Tim to write down the total and the seven-letter bonus and total up the new score.

“Then tell me, Deputy Marshal Gutterson, what is it you comprehend in Raylan that redeems him from poor taste in radio stations—a sin, I might add, for which he’s been culpable since before your birth.”

Tim played ‘ness’ on ‘vengeful’ and barely made it fit on the board, counted out each piece to buy himself time while Boyd Crowder steepled his fingers and watched him like a cheetah who’d just spotted the weakest wildebeest in the pack. Tim wondered if his targets had ever felt the skin on their neck prickle, when he watched them without blinking through the scope.

“Who says I comprehend anything in him?” Tim finally replied, because the silence was stretching and Boyd didn’t look inclined to play his new tiles until he’d heard from Tim. Normally Tim could outlast any silence, could sit there for days, but the dog had left him jittery and on edge and Boyd Crowder wasn’t helping a damn bit. “He dragged me out here to get mauled to death by a dog, he doesn’t think the rules apply to him, especially if the rule is not to shoot, he takes off without bothering to pick up the phone, and he can’t cook.”

The last bit slipped out of Tim’s mouth without his permission, and he hoped that maybe it would slip by in the rest of the rant, that Crowder would focus on the shooting or the dog. Boyd huffed softly, frowned a little and curled over his letters to play ‘poise’ off of ‘ploy’, and Tim wasn’t even going to ask what kind of word ‘oe’ was, because no doubt Boyd Crowder had a Scrabble dictionary hidden somewhere behind the bar. Hell, he probably had one on his nightstand, swallowed a page or two before he went to sleep.

“Now, that is true,” Boyd finally said, derailing Tim’s hopes and his tally and making him start over again on the ‘p’. “Raylan’s success in the kitchen could be measured in soupcons. They never do remember to include that fact, do they, all those times he shoots his way into the evening news?”

“He ain’t the only one murdering his way onto the news,” Tim retorted, gave up counting and played ‘de’ over ‘ploy’, made sure he kept his sneer aimed at Boyd Crowder the whole time.

“I am just a man, Marshal Gutterson,” Boyd said so solemnly that it made a mockery of the words, pressing his hands to his chest. “Not so different from you.” And if everyone who grew up in a shitty house with an asshole father turned to crime, Tim wanted to say, there wouldn’t be a decent man left alive. But – “Not so different from Raylan,” Boyd added, before Tim could work up the anger to speak, doling out Raylan’s name in slow syllables like he always did.

“Hmph,” Tim managed, because he knew better than to believe that.

“I would warn you,” Boyd began, and Tim tensed and thought maybe he should have kept one hand on his gun, but Boyd only reached out his empty hand and picked up a tile to play ‘zealot’ off the ‘e’ in ‘poise’, “not to cling to idols.” Boyd frowned at something far more distant than Tim, and shook his head. “It is better to stand on your own than prostrate yourself at another man’s feet.”

“You speaking from experience?” Tim replied, arched both his eyebrows and played ‘latrine’ off the ‘l’ in ‘vengeful’, busied himself adding everything up so he could look sideways at Boyd.

Boyd lifted the corner of his mouth in something familiar that wasn’t quite a smile, tipped his head and awarded the point to Tim. Boyd Crowder was Raylan’s villain, and Tim hadn’t anticipated he’d ever be sitting across from the black-haired half of the legend playing a board game and idly considering the idea of reaching for his gun and finishing off the story the way he always did, a single bullet and the six tiles laid out to read ‘the end’.

Boyd didn’t seem inclined to continue the conversation, so Tim picked his new letters out of the dwindling pile and asked something that had been on his mind since Raylan had wrecked the last story and refused to help fashion something new. “Were Raylan and Ava high school sweethearts?” he asked, distracted Boyd from reordering his tiles and made him snort.

“They were not,” Boyd said, looking more amused than Tim thought was merited, since it was a perfectly reasonable question to ask. “And I would speculate that you have already made these inquiries to Raylan and been informed as to this irrefutable fact. Was his answer unsatisfactory to you?”

Tim shrugged. “She acted like Raylan left her behind,” he said, eyeing the board and waiting on Boyd to play. “So I figured maybe he had.”

“He did.” Boyd stuck ‘dacoit’ on the ‘i’ in ‘latrine’ and regarded Tim with a dark look that made him think twice about challenging the word. “Raylan left all Harlan and everyone in it behind, Lieutenant Gutterson. I would have expected you to know that.”

“And all Harlan was broken hearted?” Tim shot back, because apparently he was growing used to bickering with legends in his spare time, and played ‘cob’ on the ‘c’.

Boyd rubbed at his chest, and Tim wondered if it ached, where Raylan had shot him, if it twinged every time Raylan killed someone who wasn’t Boyd.

“I’m still not too sure about ‘dacoit’,” Tim added, and Boyd Crowder smirked and spread his arms wide and Raylan Givens strode into the bar, his boot heels clicking on the floor.

 

It didn’t end like Tim had thought it would. Oh, he and Raylan ended exactly like Tim had imagined, Miss Kitty and a baby drawing Raylan inexorably back to them, and if Tim thought that it was only a matter of time before Raylan tired of keeping house and rode away—well, he kept his mouth shut and focused on the business at hand.

But they came to the showdown in the hills and Raylan Givens didn’t shoot and Boyd Crowder didn’t shoot, and the hero and the villain both walked out alive. Plenty of other folks died, though, and for a moment Raylan Givens looked less like the scary story told by new recruits and more like an angry man with a hair trigger temper, Rachel’s lit fuse.

It was impossible to imagine Raylan Givens somewhere that wasn’t in the mountains of Kentucky, even harder to imagine him chasing after anything but Boyd Crowder, both of them lingering in the syllables of the other’s name. And yet the villain left for prison and the hero left for Miami and those of them left standing found themselves arresting uninventive tax evaders and transporting complacent prisoners, adjusting to life outside of Harlan’s bloody fairytales.

It took two weeks for Art to retire to Georgia, three for Tim to put in for a transfer to anyplace that wasn’t eastern Kentucky. The U.S. Marshals Service ordered him to report to Texas, and Tim laughed harder than he had in years, laughed so hard that Rachel wandered out of her new office and over to Tim’s desk to see if he’d finally scattered his marbles across the floor.

His first day in Texas, he mailed Rachel a hat. His first week in the new office he busted an international racketeering ring, followed his marshal’s stiffy like Art had taught him, suspected everyone like Rachel would have done, kept talking and smirking like Raylan always did until somebody finally cracked. He called for backup, though—learned something else from Raylan, from working with a legend and discovering that living in a myth wasn’t as romantic as it seemed—and only took aim at a fleeing criminal’s knees.

“That was some top-notch work, Deputy,” Tim’s new Chief said, after they’d brought the criminals to holding and didn’t crowd into the Chief’s office for a toast, “and some real sharpshooting, too. We’ll have to head out to the range next week, you can show us what you got.”

Tim’s chest filled with something like pride, and he hadn’t even killed a man. He went out to the bar that night, ordered a few shots without asking for the bottle, and didn’t flinch when a good-looking man in a hat slipped onto the stool next to him and smiled in the face of Tim’s scowl.

“Buy you a drink?” the cowboy asked, just a man in a hat tilted back and watching Tim’s face, waiting on him to say no. "I noticed you were running low."

_You’re a good man, Tim Gutterson_ , Rachel had said, on his last day, stared him down with her implacable gaze til Tim couldn’t do anything but concede. _You go on out there and make a good life_.

_I ain’t anybody’s hero_ , Raylan had told him time and again, had scratched his head and refused to answer when Tim said, _What about Boyd’s?_

And if Tim wasn’t in anybody’s story—well, hell, maybe it was time to stop clinging to idols, to stand on his feet and start a story of his own.

“Anything but bourbon,” Tim said, and reached across the bar to take the cowboy’s outstretched hand.


End file.
